There is an infamous scene during John McNaughton’s Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer in which the film’s two protagonists are seen torturing and ultimately murdering an innocent family, which is disturbing enough in and of itself, until we then cut away from the scene to find that we have actually – and chillingly – been watching the killers watching themselves perform these deeds. It is in this detached act of voyeurism that we find the most human of truths: we habitual third-party observers, even in the face of injustice, intolerance and iniquity. This framing device is a trope which has been used so often in popular culture that we barely register its recurrences, and has been used across the board (in one form or another) by Coleridge, Shelley, Robert Wiene and The Simpsons. Ryan Gander, at Night in the Museum, uses a similar framing device in the form of Degas’ Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, ostensibly to focus on the act of looking (we encounter, throughout the exhibition, examples of sculptural works “looking” at two-dimensional artefacts from the Arts Council Collection). However, the vaguest familiarity with Degas’ sculpture discloses an historical truth: at the time of its creation, Little Dancer represented the face of the underclass which art criticism balked at. Rendered in beeswax, as opposed to the more traditional bronze, and lacking in grace, she was stuffed away in Degas’ cupboard for more than half-a-century until she emerged somewhat serendipitously, in 1956, to a slightly more enlightened age.

In 2008, Heimo Zobernig unveiled his curatorial intervention – titled Heimo Zobernig and the Tate Collection in his characteristic detachment – which brought together artefacts from the Tate’s collection and arranged them with a certain dialogical tension alongside the Austrian artist’s stripped-down, aloof (yet, for all that, playful) works. Zobernig, with tongue-in-cheek, obstructed the view from the gallery of the Cornish coastline with a red chroma-key curtain. One can read this is a pointed suspension of the relationship between art and leisure, or indeed the preoccupation with the aesthetic balance – a thing which even today is all-too-British. It was in such disruptions that Zobernig’s exhibition succeeded dialectically, whereas Ryan Gander’s decision to use The Little Dancer in the aforesaid prosopopoeial manner (ostensibly to exemplify a notion of formal liberation) is little more than a cynical attempt to bring the family back into a modernised version of that very thing which Zobernig disrupted.

In this sense, the Gas Hall is an ideal parallel of both the Little Dancer’s story and the present-day state of Government funding of The Arts: until privatisation, this hall was used by Birmingham’s populace to make their gas payments and, although we no longer queue in our serried bureaucratic misery, we are still nonetheless paying a debt. Today’s debt in the Gas Hall is our collective tribute towards a threat of “use it or lose it,” and this re-imagining by Gander of the Little Dancer, as she surveys Modern and Contemporary Art and its indifference to proletariat ballet enthusiasts, finds her in an age in which Britain is happy to pat itself on the back for its obedience to the tribute. Not only is Britain retentive of an holistic understanding of its own cultural heritage, but has also fostered an appreciation of the historical imparity of others’. One sees art-world rhetoric scattered throughout the exhibition, designed – one imagines – to encourage the family away from Ikea and into the museum:

“The reason why being an artist is one of the greatest jobs in the world is that you get to see what intangible ideas look like in the real world – the fallout of thinking is never quite as you imagined it.”

One such magniloquently declarative soundbite boasts in yellow-on-spruce, in its congruent nestling among other such quotes which only ever belong either on a Sky Arts ident or, like here, as a congratulatory punch on the arm to the “family what arts.” A municipal enterprise such as the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, forever chasing next year’s pot of municipal gold, is terminally enslaved to such bombastic cultural jingoism.

Gander’s curatorial choices (my cynical take on the exhibition notwithstanding) are well-chosen, given the theme of a crepuscular, after-hours museum. The paintings, impressively supplied by Robyn Denny, Patrick Caulfield et al, are all of a deep-blue, evening hue. Though it is the sculptural work which is truly meant to attract visitors. Sirs Jacob Epstein and Henry Moore, solidified within the cultural lexicon of the Twenty-and-Twenty-First Centuries, give the Arts Council the greatest opportunity to flex its muscle, whilst more subdued works by such contemporary figures as Angela Bulloch are arranged as conversation pieces for the uninitiated. As ever, though, with such municipal ventures, the focus is always upon education – not to mention the implicit condescension that the age of advanced technology has somehow made the populace more beastly and torpid towards its own culture.

Curiously, the museum elevator is out of order, and given my present cynicism I am forced to entertain the notion that Gander has engineered a false breakage. My suspicions are leant further buoyancy when a mother with a pram arrives in exasperation of this situation, and as I help her up the stairs towards the museum’s main body I cannot help but feel as though I have been caught up in some elaborate postmodern rouse. Promotional material for Julia Donaldson’s timely half-term exhibition promises more prams and pushchairs in pursuit of the Gruffalo – a beast whose ferocity in outweighed only by his own credulity. As we part the exhibition, this updated morality tale feels like the most pernicious indictment of Night in the Museum of all.

The Birmingham weather beating its seasonal tattoo upon the roof of the Ikon provides a soundtrack of no small irony as, accompanied by the spirit of Antonin Artaud and my six-year-old Son and with a handmade poster declaiming human BSE as a conversational topic-starter, we are politely informed of the explicit content beyond. We take heed of this caution and, indeed, there are penises to behold, though their depictions are merely cartoonish, and not quite as explicit to stir Artaud’s spirit. I mention to him that there is more than a hint of Ballard to this exhibition and so, discouraged to venture any further and already perceiving that the fare on offer is not nearly as cruel or absurd enough for him, he decides to wait outside. Had I also mentioned to him that the questionable imagery was to be found on paintings made of brain matter, I muse, perhaps his enthusiasm would not has dissipated so rapidly.
I feel wholly justified in invoking Artaud’s ghost for this occasion for, if not in the individual works themselves, then certainly within Roger Hiorns’ modus operandi does the late playwright also haunt. One only has to listen to Hiorns enthuse about the body – its fragility, its impermanence, its bloody-minded capacity to survive – to hear echoes of Artaud’s oft-repeated rant:

“When you will have made him a body without organs, Then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions And restored him to his true freedom.”

We guard ourselves constantly from the dangers of the world; we distrust its total indifference to our perpetuity, and yet in doing so we inevitably surrender ourselves to those elements which we fail to perceive. This has been at the heart of Hiorns’ output for a number of years now, and accordingly this new exhibition feels like a retrospective in all but name.
Once more, Ikon have selected a body (pun only slightly intended) of work which sits somewhere fashionably in the middle of concept and delivery and which plays on the gallery’s layout sparingly, yet with the feeling of contrivance. As though Hiorns himself vacillated between “too much” and “too little,” decided upon the former only to pad the remaining space out needlessly with work of spurious kinship to the rest; invention sits uneasily amongst a number of nigh-on unnecessary works. Already there is a confusion of materials: on the one hand, Hiorns has clearly handed the lion’s share of his most recent, untitled, exhibition over to the body, hence the piqued interest of Artaud’s discorporated spirit. Simultaneously, however, the artist’s obsession with jet engines refuses to give way to the dominant theme. There are the powdered remains of such an engine, like a wild card set into an oblong on the floor and incongruous with the anatomical thread herein. Like a joke that one cannot bring oneself to stop telling, Hiorns has been displaying this piece for at least three years already, and perhaps should now let go.
This is not to suggest that the work as a whole is in any way old hat. There are some profound sparks on offer throughout the first floor, such as the weighted stunt dummies which hang in a Damoclean manner from the main wall (one of which, Hiorns ensures us, contains a copy of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, although we have only his word on this) and the aforementioned Ballard-esque humanoid forms. Had the late HR Geiger (who famously trod more heavily upon the realm of the phallic) extended his vision of the biological incorporating the mechanical to include the machinery readily available to all, rather than relying on an idea which was uniformly one of science fiction, his output may well have resembled the technologically-transmorphic “bodies” hung (inferred symbolically) from Ikon’s ceiling. All historical and literary allusions aside, the key issue here is that Hiorns is becoming an artist with the depth and scope to fill Tate Modern’s colossal Turbine Hall, yet still labours to produce sculptural works for a gallery space on a human scale. He wants us not to be a mere audience because these works come alive when we interact with them; they only realise their full meaning when we able-bodied and fully organic creatures walk among them, so that not just our differences to these bastardised figures stand out, but also our similarities.

Roger Hiorns has a keen eye for those elements of quotidian contrivances which emulate human nature: thus we encounter assemblages of car parts steadily ejaculating foam – a visual shorthand, one imagines, for the human propensity for talking much, yet saying little. Hiorns, however, is not so cynical. There is hope here for humanity in all its fleshy, febrile organic frailty. We can live, Hiorns says, beyond epidemics, beyond political turmoil and further beyond what our increasingly-delicate climate can burden us with. Perhaps because the individual body still holds sovereignty over yesterday’s dystopian vision of a Brave New World, Hiorns also refers to older work addressing the issue of vCJD and, more broadly, the body’s susceptibility to micro-organic attack.
His sculptural work alludes more to the failing of the human body than it does to human failings, as one can intuit when passing from one room containing these aforementioned hybridised marionettes into another with an upended (and presumably defunct) X-ray machine. Topical, in an age of endless NHS cutbacks, the piece retains a dry wit of its own: the dead machinery left to rot as the patients it once assisted back to health suffer a similar fate.

“There is nothing more useless than an organ!” cries Artaud’s mad ghost from the courtyard below and I – taking my Son by the hand and re-joining him outside– am compelled to agree.